by Victor Milán
Elizabeth’s childhood memories of her mother were sketchy: a thin, frail woman of medium height, who might almost have been pretty had she been able to straighten her shoulders and get the bags from under her eyes. More vivid were the memories of Grandma Anna: stocky, with a thick unbending neck, a round face and round rimless spectacles, and a way of standing with legs apart and braced, leaning slightly forward, like a wrestler about to go on the offensive.
Anna McConnachie had a simple equation for life: when she was speaking to her daughter, it was Sarah who bore responsibility for the vicissitudes and misery to which Anna and “poor Elizabeth” were prey. When she spoke to Elizabeth, the girl was the cause of the difficulties that beset her mother and grandmother. Sometimes—rarely—Sarah had tried to fight back, and on several occasions had even packed up Elizabeth and fled. Such displays of defiance reduced Anna to tears, and Sarah’s determination never held out long against the overwhelming guilt at being unkind to her old and helpless mother.
Sometimes at night (like now) Elizabeth would recall her grandmother, and if she was especially maudlin (not yet), even cry a little. The old woman had brutalized her with her no-win games—yet she had loved Elizabeth in her own way. Elizabeth hadn’t known enough love to spurn any source, no matter how much pain was exacted in its giving.
Elizabeth grew up graceless, cursed with braces and thick glasses. Both mother and grandmother encouraged her early interest in books, with the result that her classmates thought her funny and teased her without mercy. Growing into unlovely pubescence, Elizabeth found retreat in her books: Little Women, histories—of medieval Europe and Japan, especially—books on dinosaurs and natural history, and, finally, her greatest love of all, science fiction. In high school she gravitated toward science and math, for which she displayed a considerable faculty. In her sophomore year she began taking classes in computer programming, and the rest, as they say, was history.
She shook her head and turned on a light. Why am I doing this to myself? I should he ecstatic. It was time to seek the familiar shelter of her books. With a spoken command to the com/comm unit she could call up any of the millions of volumes digitalized and stored, either in Yoshimitsu Central’s own files, or—using the high-limit credit access Yoshimitsu Akaji had granted her—in any of the various information and data networks around the world. She could even have the book of her choice read aloud to her by a tireless Gen-5 servant, thereby saving her eyes as well as her hands. Instead, she rolled open the little swingout shelf inset in the wall above her bed, pulled out an ageing paperback, its pages yellowed, its spine well appliquéd with Scotch tape. Her favorite book of all time: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein. She laid it in her lap, opened it, began to read.
And, in time, found her mind drifting to where it always went when she was alone, lonely, and most especially in danger of being happy: Susan.
* * * * *
They had met at a gay women’s party in Fort Collins, Colorado. On the whole, Elizabeth O’Neill had found her two previous attempts at a gay relationship as disappointing and dispiriting as her encounters with heterosexuality. It hadn’t taken her long at all to become disenchanted with radical gay feminism; most of its proponents she came across were as threatened by her as were most men. But still she drifted to the functions from time to time, out of some vague sense of duty and the desire to get out from between the walls of her apartment.
Dr. Susan Burroughs was a professor of sociology at the nearby Colorado State University and everything Elizabeth O’Neill wasn’t: blond, athletic, socially agile, attractive. O’Neill was in retreat from the cutting edge of computer science, hiding in semi-disgrace in the plains of northern Colorado. She’d received notice that her theories were to come under review by the National Scientific Oversight Commission, which had been formed at the joint demand of the Committee for Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, conservatives afraid of “technological hemorrhage” to the USSR, and technofear buffs in the tradition of Jeremy Rifkin. No institution that got a penny of federal funding would touch her, and even major private concerns would be leery of inviting the beady-eyed scrutiny of the NSOC by employing a suspected scientific heretic. O’Neill was pale and overweight, beginning the seamless slide into premature middle age, reduced to freelancing computer consulting work long-distance. Yet somehow she and Susan had fit, had slipped together without perceptible effort on her part.
O’Neill could barely believe her fortune. Her relationship with Susan was only sporadically sexual; they shared a house, similar tastes in art and music, and a warm encompassing companionship. Yet Elizabeth often found herself wondering just what she had to offer a woman like Susan. And too often, the answer came up: nothing.
It was her fault the relationship had started to crumble, she knew. Her understanding with Susan was nonbinding. Susan knew her partner was, at base, not much interested in sex; at times Susan was very interested indeed and needed the company of other women or men. O’Neill tried hard to be understanding. Susan had these needs, which she herself could not fulfill. It was unfair to resent Sue’s wandering, but she did. One day Susan brought home a pretty red-haired student from her graduate program for dinner, O’Neill threw a tantrum, and Susan was gone for a week.
After that their relationship resembled an old pair of jeans, often torn and often patched. When the offer came to fly to Japan to discuss her theories on artificial consciousness with the head of a major corporation, the respite came as a relief. Her flying trip to Yoshimitsu Central was followed by a six-month return trip to lay the foundation for the TOKUGAWA Project. Her relationship with Susan stayed on hold by mutual consent. And when O’Neill returned again to the little frame house in Fort Collins, with its art-gallery posters and butcher-block furnishings, she knew that in two weeks she would be going back to Japan for the duration of the project.
Her reunion with Susan was strained. At first Elizabeth feared she’d finally found someone to take her place. Then, at dinner of the second day after she came home, it all poured out: Susan accused her of abandoning her. Susan had always been wary of technology, preferring to keep a certain amused distance between herself and her roommate’s work. Now it crushed her that Elizabeth was forsaking her to pursue the chimera of a machine that mimicked the human soul. O’Neill defended herself, bitter words ensued; Susan stormed out of the house and drove off to Denver to stay with a former lover. O’Neill spent the next solitary night and day in depression and growing doubt. Was pursuing this dream of hers—rejected as fantastic by most of her peers—worth forsaking Susan’s love? Perhaps it was true, as Susan said, that she put science and machines before people. Perhaps it was time to give over the search for her personal Grail, to become an integrated member of society. At the end of that day, Elizabeth O’Neill resolved to go down to Denver the next day and bring her back.
And then the sirens raised their demon song.
No one could ever say why Denver should have collected a ground burst. Air bursts produced no fallout to speak of, but far wider-ranging destruction. Conceivably, Denver and Lowry Air Force Base had enough strategic value to justify the pair of one-megaton warheads detonated in the air over the city. Harder to explain why one had grounded in Commerce City on the north side of town, laying a heavy pall of fallout over the eastern half of the metropolitan area.
Blindly as a salmon bound to spawn, O’Neill drove south after the all-clear, breasting the tide of refugees swarming out of the stricken city. The crater lay within two kilometers of the house to which Susan Burroughs had fled—well within range of flesh-melting heat and the brunt of the rolling blast wave. Of the suburban area where Susan had gone remained nothing but burnt-out rubble, through which a gaunt-eyed National Guard squad on rescue detail had found Elizabeth O’Neill wandering the next day.
At the Red Cross emergency station in an elementary school in Thornton, north of Denver, the next day, she was discovered to have received a whole-body exposure in the vic
inity of a thousand rems. That put her past the red line of 99 percent fatality; since O’Neill already displayed the awful, bone-deep lethargy common among victims of severe radiation poisoning, the medics decided to triage her. She was given a cot in an overcrowded ward and forgotten.
Yet she never showed further signs of exposure. No diarrhea, no loss of motor control, not even the frightening, if transient, depilation and skin discoloration that generally occurred even at much lower exposure levels. Three weeks passed with no change in her condition. When somebody noticed this, the overworked staff shrugged and carried on; exposure-effects tables, after all, were like all such compilations, statistical. Some people had high susceptibility to radiation poisoning, others a strong resistance. Elizabeth O’Neill was clearly one of the latter. Had the Red Cross personnel, hopelessly overwhelmed by the deluge of casualties caused by the thermonuclear exchange and now flooded anew by victims of the mindless spasms of violence that followed, still had any emotion left, they would have been glad for her.
Only the terrible apathy persisted, and in doing so it shielded O’Neill from the horrors of the days that followed. The camp was overrun by armed ragged men, who shot most of the Red Cross personnel and raped a number of the women. In their turn they were driven out by the National Guard. Waves of random violence, like delayed aftershocks of the bombing itself, swept incessantly over the camp. Only vaguely was O’Neill aware of any of it.
Nor was she particularly cognizant, six weeks after the bombing, when she was rescued. Like a Japanese H. Ross Perot, old Yoshimitsu Akaji had hired a team of American Special Forces veterans to bring his prize scientist out of the shattered country.
After a series of adventures in which she was a passive, uncaring participant O’Neill came safely to Japan. She spent a further four weeks under observation before Yoshimitsu doctors decided that, in fact, she’d suffered no ill effects as the result of her exposure to radiation. She gradually pulled free of her apathy and threw herself at her work like one drowning.
Five months later, she collapsed under a sudden onslaught of multiple sclerosis. Her immune system turned suddenly upon itself, dissolving the sheets of myelin that provided the insulation for her neural circuits. The onset was devastating. If it hadn’t been for newly developed drugs—with certain severe side effects—she would have died within a year. As it was, selective immunosuppressants that prevented her autoimmune system from attacking the nerve sheathing, and a special drug that to an extent replaced the missing myelin insulation, had been able to slow down the progress of the disease. It continued its inexorable progress, destroying her dominion over her own body, but with glacial slowness. Still, if the drugs were withdrawn, her life might be measured in days or even hours.
And Susan, Susan, I turned you out to die…
* * * * *
“Dr. O’Neill.”
She looked up from her book. The little goosenecked reading light over the bed sent daggers into her eyes. She glanced to her room communicator. “Yes? What is it?” she asked peevishly.
“It is TOKUGAWA, Doctor.”
The skin of her cheeks pulled up in tiny ridges, and she felt a strange trickle down the back of her esophagus. “How—how did you find me?”
“I wanted to talk to you. I read the address for your terminal out of the database. Did I do wrong?”
“Huh? Oh, no—not at all,” she said, still flustered. He’s progressing far ahead of schedule, she thought, trying to regain objectivity. “In fact, I’m proud of you for having figured out how to get in touch with me. That was very clever.”
A pause.
“Thank you, Doctor.”
O’Neill grinned. He’s already learning politeness, she thought. How very Japanese. “Is something the matter?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
It was impossible to miss the hesitance in the words. If only the fools could hear this—they couldn’t deny he’s sentient.
“What happened today…”
When the silence began to grow painful, she prodded, gently, “Yes?”
“I—it seemed I was a person, though very small. I had limbs, like you, and I could move all around. I picked up a ball and threw it, though I couldn’t make it go where I wanted. I could feel myself. Now I can’t. I try to move my limbs, and I can’t find them. I try to feel my body, but I don’t have it anymore. Is there something wrong with me, Doctor? Am I not formed properly?”
“You—oh, you poor, poor thing.” O’Neill took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She felt moisture in rivulets on her cheeks. “There’s nothing wrong with you, dear. But… you’re not a human.”
“Then I’m not a person.”
“No! You are a person. You’re not a human being. You’re a person of a different kind.”
“Are there different kinds of persons?”
“Not before now, TOKUGAWA. Oh, there’s evidence that gorillas and chimps and dolphins can be educated to be people, but that’s still not a very popular line of research. But in the past, only human beings have been people. You’ve changed all that, TOKUGAWA. You’re a new type of person.”
A long pause. “But it seemed I was like you.” It may have been the product of her imagination, but O’Neill could clearly hear hurt, hesitation, a touch of petulance in the words. Like a child.
“You’ve got to understand, TOKUGAWA, the only kind of people we know anything about is humans. It’s the only type of experience we understand, So when we’re trying to teach you, provide you with experiences of your own, it’s human experience we have to draw upon.” She bit her lip.
“Maybe it’s unfair. Maybe we should let you develop on your own. It seems likely that—that silicon-based life forms such as yourself may, if left to themselves, develop consciousness very much different from the human. But we’re limited; we can’t really conceive of that. And there are—other considerations that make it important for you to be educated in the shortest possible period of time. So we’re doing it as best we know how. By teaching you to be a human.”
“But I’m not a human.”
“No.” Then, half against her will: “But you could be so much more, TOKUGAWA. You could be the most potent being ever known.”
Part of her sneered at herself: how very melodramatic! But here, alone in her room and yet not alone, she confronted the truth of what she had wrought and found it both awful and magnificent. A sense of tremendous responsibility descended upon her, and she found the weight a sadness and an exaltation.
“Yet to move about, to feel, to throw a ball into the air… I don’t know how to express it. Something—I feel—”
“You are sad.”
Pause.
“Yes, Doctor. I am sad.”
CHAPTER 4
“Gentlemen,” Ishikawa Nobuhiko said as tea was poured. “How kind of you to meet with me for lunch.”
Ogaki Mitsuru, president of Hiryu Cybernetics Industries, Incorporated, nodded his axe-blade face brusquely. Kneeling beside him at the low table, his special accounts executive, moonfaced Toda Onomori, nodded as well. “So good of the minister to spare us time from his busy schedule,” he said blandly, as if Ishikawa had not initiated, even demanded, the meeting.
“And how goes work on your sixth-generation projects?” The sixth generation, an elaboration of the fifth, had been encompassed as far back as the 1980s. Hiryu was involved intimately with the scheme, as it had been with ICOT and work on the fifth generation. Ishikawa was about to call in some debts of very long standing.
“Well enough,” rapped Ogaki.
For a time, Ishikawa exchanged null-content conversation with Toda as to the state of Hiryu’s researches, while the lunchtime crush surged about their table and Ogaki champed glumly at his sushi. Then, leaning casually back, Ishikawa said, “I cannot describe to you the pleasure it gives me to work with such responsible parties as yourselves, who think only of the greater good of Japan.” He sighed, world weary. “A pity not everyone can be so cooperative.�
�� Ogaki visibly perked up. He was almost as bad at Japanese indirection as an American. That was why Toda Onomori was so very valuable to him.
“Hiryu Cybernetics Industries are ever sensible of their role in restoring the kokutai,” said Toda.
“Your dedication to our national essence gladdens me. Others”—he waved a hand—“it is not enough that they shirk their responsibility to the nation, to restrict destructive competition for the good of all. Some are even so adamant as to refuse to accept the benevolent administrative guidance of my ministry.”
Toda nodded again. Ogaki was staring directly at Ishikawa, his eyes glittering like obsidian flakes. “Some are like schoolboys and must be severely rebuked to accept disciplines’ Toda said.
Ishikawa nodded. “Just so. Yet, as you know, my ministry is advisory in nature. We possess few means of chastising the unruly. And the Supreme Court is ever watchful, in its rightful role of guardian of our constitution, that we do not exceed our powers.” That ridiculous piece of paper the gaijin foisted on us! He presented a lopsided grin, knowing his dimples made him look boyishly sincere. “We are, of course, most grateful for their tutelage.”
“The wise and dutiful are always grateful for the just guidance of their superiors,” Toda said.
“Still,” the vice-minister said, with a precise degree of wistfulness, “those of us who hold the interests of the nation in our hearts cannot but regret the selfish ways of certain parties, who might fail to see the necessity of sharing the benefits of a major breakthrough.”
Ogaki leaned forward, fingers digging like talons into his serge-covered thighs, his eyes slits into the core of a black star. Then he eased back and tipped his head slyly sideways. “Can it be that we might help where the vice-minister finds his hands tied, eh?”
“Not that we presume to take upon ourselves that which the minister himself does not command,” Toda put in, smoothing over his superior’s broken-glass jagged eagerness. “Nonetheless, perhaps the servant can act where the master cannot.”
